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Jul. 23rd, 2013 08:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pearwaldorfcross-posted from Tumblr, because this is where long things go, apparently. Context: Welcome to Night Vale has eaten my brain. I'd say send help but I'm enjoying myself too much.
(I got the inevitable "wtf is Night Vale and what's so good about it?" ask from somebody, and this is more or less what I excitedly word-vomited at them, so I thought I would clean it up for general consumption. Cut for length and discussion of plot points that everybody probably knows already but just in case.)
I'm sure you're familiar with the general concept? I mean, it is basically community radio for all the weird towns like Twin Peaks and Eureka and Sunnydale. The ridiculous improbable events are narrated so straightforwardly and matter-of-fact-ly it's practically absurdist. I enjoy that a great deal. The writing is sharp and funny, and Cecil Baldwin is an excellent narrator. He has that amazing quintessential Cronkite/Murrow voice that, at least on this side of the pond, is synonymous with a very specific sort of wholesome idealized lifestyle, and thus the contrast is deeply amusing.
I also fully acknowledge that Cecil and Carlos and their budding relationship are very strong draws for many people in fandom, myself included. I was talking about this with another friend, and I hadn't realized how much being in Bioware fandom has completely warped my perspective on the canonicity of queer relationships (in that they exist at all). In works where you more or less build your own canon in that regard, and are given that choice, it's a non-issue, as I'm sure Bioware intended. But as you know, the rest of the world does not think like Bioware does, and it feels like a great deal of popular media has more or less chosen to deliberately queerbait fans who are desperate for that sort of interaction (Sherlock, White Collar, Rizzoli and Isles to name just a few off the top of my head) but never explicitly make it canon.
So having a canon queer possibly interracial (Of course, nobody is quite sure if Cecil is even human. We know he wears a tie and has skin, ears, and a voice. He also wears shoes. And that's about it.) relationship is fucking huge. And it is a testament to how unusual this is that people who haven't listened all the way through the episodes were absolutely *certain* Tumblr was trying to create a ship out of thin air. So it is a thing I cling fiercely to, and I know many other people do as well. [After digging up an interview for the paragraph below it appears this is something Messrs. Fink and Craynor were planning from almost the very beginning, and that just makes my heart go squish a bit.]
The more I think about it, the more I realize Lovecraft would probably hate Welcome to Night Vale. Please allow me a digression to explain. As we all probably know, Lovecraft was a horrifically virulent racist. He named his cat after a racial slur, ffs. (No really.) Nnedi Okarafor writes a really amazing post (trigger warning for aforementioned horrifically virulent racism), with guest quotes by China Mieville, about Lovecraft, winning the World Fantasy Award, and having a statue of a man like that in her house. But the influence of his work is extant, even on people like Fink and Craynorwho never intended to make their work Lovecraftian. There's a beautiful phrase from Mieville in that blog post, "writing behind Lovecraft's back", by which he means acknowledging his influence on a whole body and genre of work, but never forgetting the odiousness of the man himself. And I think Welcome to Night Vale continues in that particular vein whether Fink and Craynor consciously intend it to or not. Because really, a town that could be Dunwich in the desert, where the narrator of the radio show makes fun of racist white guys appropriating native clothes and customs and is in a possibly interracial queer relationship? I think he'd fucking hate it, and that brings me a lot of satisfaction.
(I got the inevitable "wtf is Night Vale and what's so good about it?" ask from somebody, and this is more or less what I excitedly word-vomited at them, so I thought I would clean it up for general consumption. Cut for length and discussion of plot points that everybody probably knows already but just in case.)
I'm sure you're familiar with the general concept? I mean, it is basically community radio for all the weird towns like Twin Peaks and Eureka and Sunnydale. The ridiculous improbable events are narrated so straightforwardly and matter-of-fact-ly it's practically absurdist. I enjoy that a great deal. The writing is sharp and funny, and Cecil Baldwin is an excellent narrator. He has that amazing quintessential Cronkite/Murrow voice that, at least on this side of the pond, is synonymous with a very specific sort of wholesome idealized lifestyle, and thus the contrast is deeply amusing.
I also fully acknowledge that Cecil and Carlos and their budding relationship are very strong draws for many people in fandom, myself included. I was talking about this with another friend, and I hadn't realized how much being in Bioware fandom has completely warped my perspective on the canonicity of queer relationships (in that they exist at all). In works where you more or less build your own canon in that regard, and are given that choice, it's a non-issue, as I'm sure Bioware intended. But as you know, the rest of the world does not think like Bioware does, and it feels like a great deal of popular media has more or less chosen to deliberately queerbait fans who are desperate for that sort of interaction (Sherlock, White Collar, Rizzoli and Isles to name just a few off the top of my head) but never explicitly make it canon.
So having a canon queer possibly interracial (Of course, nobody is quite sure if Cecil is even human. We know he wears a tie and has skin, ears, and a voice. He also wears shoes. And that's about it.) relationship is fucking huge. And it is a testament to how unusual this is that people who haven't listened all the way through the episodes were absolutely *certain* Tumblr was trying to create a ship out of thin air. So it is a thing I cling fiercely to, and I know many other people do as well. [After digging up an interview for the paragraph below it appears this is something Messrs. Fink and Craynor were planning from almost the very beginning, and that just makes my heart go squish a bit.]
The more I think about it, the more I realize Lovecraft would probably hate Welcome to Night Vale. Please allow me a digression to explain. As we all probably know, Lovecraft was a horrifically virulent racist. He named his cat after a racial slur, ffs. (No really.) Nnedi Okarafor writes a really amazing post (trigger warning for aforementioned horrifically virulent racism), with guest quotes by China Mieville, about Lovecraft, winning the World Fantasy Award, and having a statue of a man like that in her house. But the influence of his work is extant, even on people like Fink and Craynorwho never intended to make their work Lovecraftian. There's a beautiful phrase from Mieville in that blog post, "writing behind Lovecraft's back", by which he means acknowledging his influence on a whole body and genre of work, but never forgetting the odiousness of the man himself. And I think Welcome to Night Vale continues in that particular vein whether Fink and Craynor consciously intend it to or not. Because really, a town that could be Dunwich in the desert, where the narrator of the radio show makes fun of racist white guys appropriating native clothes and customs and is in a possibly interracial queer relationship? I think he'd fucking hate it, and that brings me a lot of satisfaction.
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Date: 2013-07-24 01:38 pm (UTC)